What we see is a number of metrics are used to determine a ‘good’ face – certain lips, eye shapes, cheek bulges, line of nose and jaw – to be more beautiful is stricter conformance to the surgeons criteria.

Similarly there are now companies which purport to determine one’s online influence, the companies again take narrow metrics (Web 2.0 presence primarily), blend through an algorithm and spit out a result at the other end; there are people stupid enough to think this result matters and who will pay for advice on how to get a better result i.e. become more conformant to a particular company’s algorithm.

There is an implicit credulity in these scenarios that makes no sense – why would you trust a stranger’s idea of betterness over your own instincts (let alone one stranger vs. another). The problem boils down to a sense of insecurity and conditioning.

In plastic surgery it may be the combined forces of the media to portray a certain body type, on the web there are certain traits which gain most attention – insight is often overlooked in preference to boosterism, the performer who keeps the plate spinning gains more attention than the potter – and interaction rarely amounts to little more than petty ridicule.

As we know the use of metrics to assess people isn’t a new phenomenon, credit rating agencies sway the ability of people to gain loans and your flight data are catalogued by security agencies for watch lists. In addition anonymity and atomisation are nearly always inversely proportional to traction – the braggard or chancer is favoured as the focus of the spectacle.

Whereas a silicon valley company can expect to garner some interest and narrow influence due to a bit of parasitical number crunching it will have little long term effect as people become bored with the personality pyramid scheme it embodies, something as vacuous and thin as the ‘Hollywood face’ or the ‘No-fly list’.

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World Bank chief Robert Zoellick: Greece’s €130bn bailout merely buys it time

Robert Zoellick, the outgoing President of the World Bank, has warned that Greece’s latest €130bn (£108bn) bailout would merely buy it time, adding that a European recession would hamper crucial reforms needed to lift the area out of the crisis.

The desperate acts of vainglorious politicians (not to mention the blinkered journalists who insist political /economic restructuring is the big story here) are of interest for one reason only: to remind us of that feature noted by Thomas Carlyle in his opus of 1837.

Hunger and nakedness and righteous oppression lying heavy on 25 million hearts: this, not the wounded vanities or contradicted philosophies of philosophical advocates, rich shopkeepers, rural noblesse, was the prime mover in the French revolution; as the like will be in all such revolutions, in all countries.

I am indebted to Edward Hallett Carr and his magnificent lectures collected in ‘What Is History?’ for selecting this quote in his discussion that history is ‘a matter of numbers’.

Athens mayhem raises fears of Greek social explosion

(Reuters) – Greek political leaders say the nation must accept yet more punishing austerity or face a social explosion, but after a night of violence and destruction in Athens, some people fear this explosion may already be about to begin.

‘Punishing austerity’ lies heavy on more hearts every day. The number grows. History awaits.

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But back to benefits.

£24,000 net equivalent to an income of over £32,000 per year for a working family. Unfortunately many benefits claimants are sadly unable to survive on such a meagre sum when having to not work or contribute meaningfully to society for the privilege of receiving the money.

The BBQ, of all people, have provided an example of how a family would be affected by having their benefits reduced from over £30,000 to the proposed cap of just £24,000.

So, should tax-payers support these people? Let’s see how they struggle…

Current benefits: £30, 284 of money taken under threat of force from people who work for a living. More than half of it just as a reward for having bred uncontrollably.

£91 per week ‘other outgoings’: to keep the kids happy via consumerism, apparently. You don’t believe the crap about school trips, every week, do you?

£20 per week ‘entertainment’: your taxes buy this man a night out at the pub. Every week. Does he deserve this respite from his seven children and wife? Would you give him that money charitably?

£15 per week on SKY TV: ’We get the Sky Movies package because we’re stuck in the house all week – otherwise we wouldn’t have any entertainment.’  How did people survive before SKY TV? Will the family unit collapse if they have to resort to library books and freeview? Or talking to each other, heaven forbid!

£30 transport: his eldest son is scamming him for most of this if he believes 5 return bus rides to college are £30.

£32 per week on mobiles: ’My wife and I have mobile phones, and so do all of the teenage children. You try telling teenagers they’re going to have to do without their mobiles and there’ll be hell to pay.’ Your taxes are saving this man from growing a pair and keeping his children in a world of ‘whine and it shall be given’.

Energy: ‘ If they do cut our benefit we are going to have to choose between eating and heating the house properly.’ Or choose between mobiles and heating. Or beer and heating. Or fags and heating. NEVER believe these sob stories from ill-disciplined and spineless, willpower-lacking, idiocracy-generating fuckwits.

Rent £76 per week: As your state-sponsored incubus notes, this would be much more expensive were it private. Hence you are ACTUALLY paying much more than the £76 per week, as you are subsidizing the housing cost already, before a small portion of the cost is charged to, and then reclaimed by and from, our father-of-seven. All that admin costs too.

Shopping £240 per week. Includes food and household goods, 24 cans of lager, 200 cigarettes and a large pouch of tobacco. Has ‘Ray’ sent you so much as a card to say thanks for the fags and booze you buy him every week? And of course none of these ‘essentials’ could be sacrificed, which makes these proposed benefits cuts so damaging to people like Ray.

It’s easy to pick on people like Ray, and so it should be! He moans that “The market for my skills dried up 10 years ago – there’s a total lack of work in my area of expertise.” but has spent TEN YEARS breeding and little else. Retrain, do menial work, start a business, anything!

Stop supporting Ray and his work-shy ilk and let him remember where he left his self-respect, or let him rot in his own filth, before you find yourself sat at home on your recliner toilet chair watching nothing but this.

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The ceramics galleries at the Victoria and Albert Museum are a real pleasure.

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Articles like his are more useful than annoying, because it provides Libertarians an opportunity refute all of his carefully made points, and introduce people to the true core philosophy behind Libertarianism.

First things first.

What is Libertarianism?

Libertarianism is one thing and one thing only. It is the philosophy carefully described by Murray Rothbard in his book, “For a New Liberty, the Libertarian Manifesto“. It is not anything other than this.

Libertarianism is not a basket of contradictory ideas that you can mix and match to suit your personal prejudices. It is an absolutely coherent, logical and perfect basis for ethical behaviour when it comes to other human beings, outside the realm of your religious beliefs.

It is important that this definition is set out before I begin. Murray Rothbard has exposed a system of philosophy that deals with the rights of man in the same way that Newton uncovered the laws of motion. It is air tight, irrefutable, testable and completely sound.

This is very important, because there are some who use the word ‘Libertarian’ as a prefix so that they can keep the bad ideas they are wedded to and graft them on to the soundness of the Libertarian philosophy, in an attempt to lend the purity and logic of Libertarianism to their broken ideas.

Libertarian Socialism (an transparent oxymoron) is a good example of this. You can read a refutation of Libertarian Socialism here. There is no ‘left libertarianism’, ‘rightwing libertarianism’ or any other word combination Libertarianism, just as there is only a singular form of gravity, or the Strong Force, with a single nature that you are bound to deal with in this reality.

And now, to Monbiot.

Freedom: who could object? Yet this word is now used to justify a thousand forms of exploitation.

If two people agree voluntarily to exchange goods, no exploitation has taken place. This is a common mistake that Statists like George Monbiot make. We will see in this essay that his thinking is very muddled in this and many other areas.

Throughout the rightwing press and blogosphere, among thinktanks and governments, the word excuses every assault on the lives of the poor, every form of inequality and intrusion to which the 1% subject us. How did libertarianism, once a noble impulse, become synonymous with injustice?

Libertarianism is not an impulse. A frog’s leg touched by an electrode is an example of an impulse. Libertarianism is a carefully defined explanation of the rights of man. It is neither right nor left wing.

The Occupy Wall Street term ‘the 1%’ are able to prey upon people because the State is the great facilitator of predation. Sadly, people from George Monbiot’s position will not consider that the State itself is the cause of all his problems.

In the name of freedom – freedom from regulation – the banks were permitted to wreck the economy.

This is not true. As usual, people like George Monbiot do not have any understanding about the true nature of money and banking. This makes it impossible for him to come to a correct analysis of anything to do with this subject.

The banking industry is a State controlled monopoly. The State mandates the reserve requirements, and prevents competition through arbitrary licensing. It also controls the form of money (fiat currency), which is backed by nothing and which loses value by a minimum of 2% per year by design, in the case of Sterling. The economy has been ‘wrecked’ not by the banks, but by the State, its fraudulent money and its Keynesian brainwashed regulators that have no understanding of what money is, where it comes from or what it is for.

I have a feeling that if George Monbiot had a complete understanding of money, he might move towards the Austrian School, and away from the idea that the State should control money. This might be a good place for him to start.

In the name of freedom, taxes for the super-rich are cut. In the name of freedom, companies lobby to drop the minimum wage and raise working hours.

Taxation is theft. The same State that steals money from the poor through its fraudulent money printing and inflation, uses violence to steal money from the productive who create jobs with their capital and enterprise. The idea that because someone is successful they should have more of their money stolen from them is not only pure evil, but it is why industry has fled the UK for countries where hard working and inventive people are not arbitrarily preyed upon.

The minimum wage is an unwarranted interference by the State in private contracts. It stops people from gaining work experience, and acts as a disincentive to hiring. It is completely misguided to think that the minimum wage helps the poor; it does not. It simply reduces the number of jobs available. This is, of course, a separate issue from the immorality of the State interposing itself where it is not needed or wanted or morally justified in interfering.

In the same cause, US insurers lobby Congress to thwart effective public healthcare;

The provision of healthcare has been distorted almost to destruction in the USA. Where treatments were once inexpensive, they are now exorbitant. Where insurance was once affordable, it is now out of reach of millions of people. This is entirely the fault of the State. Those who are old enough to remember a time before the State interfered in medicine understand that this is the case, from first hand experience.

the government rips up our planning laws;

Planning laws are not collectively owned; it is nonsense to say that they are ‘our planning laws’. Furthermore, everything beautiful in Britain was built before the introduction of planning laws; in fact, most of Britain was built without the regulation of the State, and it produced one of the most beautiful countries on Earth. The idea that the State is needed to regulate building is a very modern and very bad idea, and it is demonstrably so. It violates people’s property rights, makes buildings uglier and more expensive and these regulations should be scrapped.

big business trashes the biosphere.

Libertarianism is the best solution to the problem of pollution. The only reason why companies can get away with pollution is because the land and rivers are not owned by individuals. If they were owned privately, pollution would be stopped over night. There is an excellent section on this in the Libertarian Manifesto, and Lew Rockwell has a superb essay on this subject that you should read.

This is the freedom of the powerful to exploit the weak, the rich to exploit the poor.

Actually, this is the effect of the State, which keeps people weak, facilitates the exploitation of everyone, including the poor, who under the wing of the State, are keep in a condition of penury.

Rightwing libertarianism recognises few legitimate constraints on the power to act, regardless of the impact on the lives of others. In the UK it is forcefully promoted by groups like the TaxPayers’ Alliance, the Adam Smith Institute, the Institute of Economic Affairs, and Policy Exchange. Their concept of freedom looks to me like nothing but a justification for greed.

There is no such thing as ‘Rightwing libertarianism’. Libertarians accept as a fundamental principle the non aggression axiom which means that they cannot initiate force against anyone for any reason. This puts a very large constraint on the power to act on Libertarians, and it also means that Libertarians are very careful not to aggress against other people, meaning that their acts should not impact on the lives of others.

That George Monbiot does not know this, demonstrates that he has had no contact with or exposure to Libertarianism. If this were not the case, he could not have written these lines.

Greed is a subjective term. It is very much like preferring chocolate over strawberry. How much money is too much, how many houses are too many and all these choices are completely personal and arbitrary, and as long as you do not steal to get what you have, its up to you how much you want to accumulate. To put it simply, greed is not something that can be measured scientifically. In this context, it is a word used to smear people and nothing more.

So why have we been been so slow to challenge this concept of liberty?

What George Monbiot has done is craft a huge straw man. “This concept of Liberty” is not what Liberty is at all; it is his idea of what Liberty is, and it is key to his position that you are never exposed to true Libertarianism, because if you are exposed to it, it is very likely that you will be swept away by its purity, beauty and the sheer unadulterated truth of it.

I challenge anyone who thinks that I am wrong to read For a New Liberty for themselves.

I believe that one of the reasons is as follows. The great political conflict of our age – between neocons and the millionaires and corporations they support on one side, and social justice campaigners and environmentalists on the other – has been mischaracterised as a clash between negative and positive freedoms. These freedoms were most clearly defined by Isaiah Berlin in his essay of 1958, Two Concepts of Liberty. It is a work of beauty: reading it is like listening to a gloriously crafted piece of music. I will try not to mangle it too badly.

This is not the true nature of the conflict, and it exposes the lack of depth of Monbiot’s thinking, which cannot penetrate any further than what is before his eyes.

The true conflict is between the State and every living human being.

Social justice campaigners and environmentalists are all fighting inside an Inception scenario, where they believe they are battling for a win where in fact, the board that they are playing on is a completely controlled artificial space where it is not possible for them to do so.

If these groups want cleaner rivers and air, they should embrace Libertarianism and property rights, and push for an end to the State. In a world where there are no public spaces, pollution becomes absolutely intolerable. Smoke stacks, acid rain, litter, dumping sewage and industrial waste into rivers and every other act of vandalism becomes impossible, because everyone, literally everyone wants to keep their own property clean.

When a space belongs to no one, that is where the garbage goes. Environmentalists that truly want to clean up the earth actually want everyone to have a stake in keeping it clean. That means property rights in everything, no public property owned by the collectivist State. It is a hard pill to swallow for many people, but in reality, it produces what they want; a clean environment where everyone is converted into an environmentalist by default.

Put briefly and crudely, negative freedom is the freedom to be or to act without interference from other people. Positive freedom is freedom from inhibition: it’s the power gained by transcending social or psychological constraints. Berlin explained how positive freedom had been abused by tyrannies, particularly by the Soviet Union. It portrayed its brutal governance as the empowerment of the people, who could achieve a higher freedom by subordinating themselves to a collective single will.

I shall leave this to the pen of Rothbard himself:

27. ISAIAH BERLIN ON NEGATIVE FREEDOM

ONE OF THE BEST-KNOWN and most influential present-day treatments of liberty is that of Sir Isaiah Berlin. In his Two Concepts of Liberty, Berlin upheld the concept of “negative liberty’’—absence of interference with a person’s sphere of action—as against “positive liberty; which refers not to liberty at all but to an individual’s effective power or mastery over himself or his environment. Superficially Berlin’s concept of negative liberty seems similar to the thesis of the present volume: that liberty is the absence of physically coercive interference or invasion of an individual’s person and property. Unfortunately, however, the vagueness of Berlin’s concepts led to confusion and to the absence of a systematic and valid libertarian creed.

One of Berlin’s fallacies and confusions he himself recognized in a later essay and edition of his original volume. In his Two Concepts of Liberty, he had written that “I am normally said to be free to the degree to which no human being interferes with my activity. Political liberty in this sense is simply the area within which a man can do what he wants.” Or, as Berlin later phrased it, “In the original version of Two Concepts of Liberty I speak of liberty as the absence of obstacles to the fulfillment of a man’s desires.”2 But, as he later realized, one grave problem with this formulation is that a man can be held to be “free” in proportion as his wants and desires are extinguished, for example by external conditioning. As Berlin states in his corrective essay,

If degrees of freedom were a function of the satisfaction of desires, I could increase freedom as effectively by eliminating desires as by satisfying them; I could render men (including myself) free by conditioning them into losing the original desires which I have decided not to satisfy.

In his later (1969) version, Berlin has expunged the offending passage, altering the first statement above to read: “Political liberty in this sense is simply the area within which a man can act unobstructed by others.”4 But grave problems still remain with Berlin’s later approach. For Berlin now explains that what he means by freedom is “the absence of obstacles to possible choices and activities,” obstacles, that is, put there by “alterable human practices.”5 But this comes close, as Professor Parent observes, to confusing “freedom” with “opportunity” in short to scuttling Berlin’s own concept of negative freedom and replacing it with the illegitimate concept of “positive freedom.” Thus, as Parent indicates, suppose that X refuses to hire Y because Y is a redhead and X dislikes redheads; X is surely reducing Y’s range of opportunity, but he can scarcely be said to be invading Y’s “freedom.”6 Indeed, Parent goes on to point out a repeated confusion in the later Berlin of freedom with opportunity; thus Berlin writes that “the freedom of which I speak is opportunity for action” (xlii), and identifies increases in liberty with the “maximization of opportunities” (xlviii). As Parent points out, “The terms ‘liberty’ and ‘opportunity’ have distinct meanings”; someone, for example, may lack the opportunity to buy a ticket to a concert for numerous reasons (e.g., he is too busy) and yet he was still in any meaningful sense “free” to buy such a ticket.7

Thus, Berlin’s fundamental flaw was his failure to define negative liberty as the absence of physical interference with an individual’s person and property, with his just property rights broadly defined. Failing to hit on this definition, Berlin fell into confusion, and ended by virtually abandoning the very negative liberty he had tried to establish and to fall, willy-nilly, into the “positive liberty” camp. More than that, Berlin, stung by his critics with the charge of upholding laissez-faire, was moved into frenetic and self-contradictory assaults on laissez-faire as somehow injurious to negative liberty. For example, Berlin writes that the “evils of unrestricted laissez faire . . . led to brutal violations of ‘negative’ liberty . . . including that of free expression or association.” Since laissez faire precisely means full freedom of person and property, including of course free expression and association as a subset of private property rights, Berlin has here fallen into absurdity. And in a similar canard, Berlin writes of

the fate of personal liberty during the reign of unfettered economic individualism—about the condition of the injured majority, principally in the towns, whose children were destroyed in mines or mills, while their parents lived in poverty, disease, and ignorance, a situation in which the enjoyment by the poor and the weak of legal rights . . . became an odious mockery.

Unsurprisingly, Berlin goes on to attack such pure and consistent laissez-faire libertarians as Cobden and Spencer on behalf of such confused and inconsistent classical liberals as Mill and de Tocqueville.

There are several grave and basic problems with Berlin’s fulminations. One is a complete ignorance of the modern historians of the Industrial Revolution, such as Ashton, Hayek, Hutt, and Hartwell, who have demonstrated that the new industry alleviated the previous poverty and starvation of the workers, including the child laborers, rather than the contrary.9 But on a conceptual level, there are grave problems as well. First, that it is absurd and self-contradictory to assert that laissez-faire or economic individualism could have injured personal liberty; and, second, that Berlin is really explicitly scuttling the very concept of “negative” liberty on behalf of concepts of positive power or wealth.

Berlin reaches the height (or depth) of this approach when he attacks negative liberty directly for having been

used to . . . arm the strong, the brutal, and the unscrupulous against the humane and the weak. . . . Freedom for the wolves has often meant death to the sheep. The bloodstained story of economic individualism and unrestrained capitalist competition does not . . . today need stressing.

The crucial fallacy of Berlin here is insistently to identify freedom and the free market economy with its opposite—with coercive aggression. Note his repeated use of such terms as “arm,” “brutal,” “wolves and sheep,” and “bloodstained,” all of which are applicable only to coercive aggression such as has been universally employed by the State. Also, he then identifies such aggression with its opposite—the peaceful and voluntary processes of free exchange in the market economy. Unrestrained economic individualism led, on the contrary, to peaceful and harmonious exchange, which benefitted most precisely the “weak” and the “sheep”; it is the latter who could not survive in the statist rule of the jungle, who reap the largest share of the benefits from the freely competitive economy. Even a slight acquaintance with economic science, and particularly with the Ricardian Law of Comparative Advantage, would have set Sir Isaiah straight on this vital point.

http://mises.org/rothbard/ethics/twentyseven.asp

By all means, read The Ethics of Liberty. It is the epitome of clear thinking and reason.

Rightwing libertarians claim that greens and social justice campaigners are closet communists trying to resurrect Soviet conceptions of positive freedom. In reality, the battle mostly consists of a clash between negative freedoms.

There is no such thing as a ‘right wing Libertarian’. Once you have read For a New Liberty you will understand why this is the case. Justice applies only to man, and not to groups of men. Man does not have rights in groups (gay rights, black rights, women’s rights etc) and so when the accusation of closet communist is bandied about, you can understand where it is coming from.

As Berlin noted: “No man’s activity is so completely private as never to obstruct the lives of others in any way. ‘Freedom for the pike is death for the minnows’.”

Man is not a fish, and only man has rights. This analogy is self evidently nonsense.

So, he argued, some people’s freedom must sometimes be curtailed “to secure the freedom of others”. In other words, your freedom to swing your fist ends where my nose begins. The negative freedom not to have our noses punched is the freedom that green and social justice campaigns, exemplified by the Occupy movement, exist to defend.

Another bad analogy. Swinging your fist to punch someone in the nose unprovoked is violent aggression. Swinging your fist for any other reason is entirely your business. If you hit someone in the nose by accident, this is not aggression, it is an accident. You can therefore punch someone in the nose without aggressing against them. Boxers do it every day for sport. A better way to put this would be to say that you should not deliberately and without provocation, punch people in the nose because doing so is an act of violence. Thinking clearly and cleanly about these matters is essential if you are to get to the bottom of them. If you start from the wrong initial premiss however, it is difficult if not impossible to arrive at the correct conclusion.

The Occupy Movement, by the admission of some of them who have managed to get on to television, does not know exactly what it wants. It has no leadership, no centrally organising body, and anyone who turns up there has an equal voice. There are many Libertarians at the Occupy gatherings, and so to attempt to co-opt that movement in this way is simply misleading.

Berlin also shows that freedom can intrude on other values, such as justice, equality or human happiness. “If the liberty of myself or my class or nation depends on the misery of a number of other human beings, the system which promotes this is unjust and immoral.” It follows that the state should impose legal restraints on freedoms that interfere with other people’s freedoms – or on freedoms which conflict with justice and humanity.

Unbelievable. Happiness is subjective, not objective or measurable. The State is not required to dispense Justice. Equality is a trigger code word that Statists use to justify their fallacious ideas. When it is used in this way, it usually means you are reading the words of a man like George Monbiot.

“If the liberty of myself or my class or nation depends on the misery of a number of other human beings, the system which promotes this is unjust and immoral.” This line is self evidently fallacious. First of all, man by his nature, does not exist as classes of men. This is a one hundred percent artificial construct. Your liberty is a function of your ability to exist free of coercion. This has nothing to do with with the emotional condition of other people (misery). You have no right to coerce others, and so as long as you do not do so, other people’s misery is not of your creation, and you cannot be blamed for it, or held responsible for it (outside of any religious obligation).

Rothbard never makes wooly statements and unfounded declarations like this. That is why I always recommend his books and essays, because there is no bad thinking in them, no leaps that depend on common knowledge. Rothbard’s thinking is a seamless, solid platform that is irrefutable, complete and absolutely correct, exposing the fundamental particles of the true nature of human interaction. Once you read Rothbard, bad thinking of the type we see here, jumps off the page with its wrong-ness.

These conflicts of negative freedom were summarised in one of the greatest poems of the 19th century, which could be seen as the founding document of British environmentalism. In The Fallen Elm, John Clare describes the felling of the tree he loved, presumably by his landlord, that grew beside his home. “Self-interest saw thee stand in freedom’s ways / So thy old shadow must a tyrant be. / Thou’st heard the knave, abusing those in power, / Bawl freedom loud and then oppress the free.”

The landlord was exercising his freedom to cut the tree down. In doing so, he was intruding on Clare’s freedom to delight in the tree, whose existence enhanced his life. The landlord justifies this destruction by characterising the tree as an impediment to freedom – his freedom, which he conflates with the general liberty of humankind.

I actually laughed out loud at this part.

Clare has no ‘freedom to delight’ in someone else’s property the landlord has an absolute right to cut down any tree on his property. If Mr. Clare wants trees, he should spend less time viewing the much admir’d trees of the Landlord, and work to secure his own property, whereupon he can have his own trees to rest under with his decedents.

Of course, if Mr. Clare is a French citizen he has no incentive to own property, because the French State declares that primogeniture is illegal and families cannot pass down property as they see fit. This forces the French Monsieur Clare to marvel at the trees owned by the State or other people, and it means that eventually all people will only be able to marvel at trees owned either by the State or by its cronies.

A small digression, but illustrative nonetheless. Property rights are the foundation of a free and prosperous society. It solves all the problems of the environment, and its beauty, and has many other side effects that are entirely beneficial.

Without the involvement of the state (which today might take the form of a tree preservation order) the powerful man could trample the pleasures of the powerless man.

On the other hand, the monarch is very good at preserving the land is it not? Richmond park is a beautiful example, with its deer, 500 year old trees and tranquil spaces. What does the State do to help Richmond Park? It builds tower blocks at its edge. Preservation orders are nothing more than theft, masquerading as an act for the ‘public good’.

But rightwing libertarians do not recognise this conflict. They speak, like Clare’s landlord, as if the same freedom affects everybody in the same way. They assert their freedom to pollute, exploit, even – among the gun nuts – to kill, as if these were fundamental human rights.

No one has the right to pollute, this is false, and no one asserts that they have the right to pollute. They can have a license from the State to pollute, but that is an entirely different thing.

When people agree to work for each other, this is not exploitation, it is a mutually agreed contract. If someone owns a tract of land and allows a mining company to mine it, this is not exploitation, it is trade.

No one who is sane and who owns guns owns them to kill. Self defence is not the same as murder, and you have a right to defend yourself. Period.

People like George Monbiot have a very confused (no wonder, look at the books he reads) idea of what rights are and where they come from. Without a proper understanding of rights, it is impossible to have a logical perspective on all of these matters, and logical thinking is essential if you are to solve any problem in logic and ethics.

They characterise any attempt to restrain them as tyranny. They refuse to see that there is a clash between the freedom of the pike and the freedom of the minnow.

The State controlling the money, movement, biology and property of man is nothing less than tyranny. The State and its many apologists have no right to control others, and the only way they can justify their inherently immoral stances is by invoking poetry. It simply will not wash.

Last week, on an internet radio channel called The Fifth Column, I debated climate change with Claire Fox of the Institute of Ideas, one of the rightwing libertarian groups that rose from the ashes of the Revolutionary Communist party. Fox is a feared interrogator on the BBC show The Moral Maze. Yet when I asked her a simple question – “do you accept that some people’s freedoms intrude upon other people’s freedoms?” – I saw an ideology shatter like a windscreen.

Monbiot needs a new prescription for his glasses… LOL!

I used the example of a Romanian lead-smelting plant I had visited in 2000, whose freedom to pollute is shortening the lives of its neighbours. Surely the plant should be regulated in order to enhance the negative freedoms – freedom from pollution, freedom from poisoning – of its neighbours? She tried several times to answer it, but nothing coherent emerged which would not send her crashing through the mirror of her philosophy.

No plant has the freedom to pollute; this is a plain straw man argument. In a Libertarian society, any lead smelting plant that poisoned a tree on someone else’s land, let alone a person, would be subject to a withering legal attack. Knowing this in advance, all lead smelters would move to the most remote and desolate places on the earth to avoid poisoning people and being hit by thousands of vigorous lawsuits.

In the land of the State however, pollution is openly permitted and merely limited to different degrees, so that businesses can deliver cheap lead ingots to industry. A lead smelting plant in the middle of nowhere that has to deliver its ingots thousands of miles before they are used would have to increase their prices dramatically. Once again, it is the State that is the problem, not industry. It is the State that permits, condones and promotes pollution. It is the State that shields the polluters. It is the State that disempowers the victims of environmental poisoning.

Environmentalists like George Monbiot fail to understand that Libertarianism, property rights and Statelessness provides them with a means to have an environment that is cleaner by orders of magnitude. It takes an insightful thinker who has read the right books to come to this conclusion however.

Modern libertarianism is the disguise adopted by those who wish to exploit without restraint. It pretends that only the state intrudes on our liberties. It ignores the role of banks, corporations and the rich in making us less free. It denies the need for the state to curb them in order to protect the freedoms of weaker people. This bastardised, one-eyed philosophy is a con trick, whose promoters attempt to wrongfoot justice by pitching it against liberty. By this means they have turned “freedom” into an instrument of oppression.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/dec/19/bastardised-libertarianism-makes-freedom-oppression

Libertarianism is the philosophy that disempowers the exploiters who use the State to license their systematic destruction of the environment. Libertarians understand what the true nature of the State is. They understand what liberty is, where it comes from and how to define it.

Libertarians understand the true nature of money. They understand how banking works, what inflation is and where it comes from. They also understand how contracts work, and your right to enter into them on whatever terms are suitable to both parties. They understand what the word ‘free’ means as it applies to man. They understand this unambiguously, without contradictions or sleights of hand, sophistry, or doublespeak.

Libertarians understand the true nature of the State, its predatory nature, and the truth of its institutionalised theft and mass murder. Libertarians understand what weak people have the same rights as the strong and that the needs of the weak are best served by understanding, defining and protecting the rights of everyone, equally.

Libertarianism is not a bastard child. It is of a clean lineage that stretches from Frédéric Bastiat to Murray Newton Rothbard to Ronald Ernest Paul to Llewellyn Harrison Rockwell. It is anything but cycloptic. It embraces everything and every possible situation where man must interact with man, and it approaches every possible scenario with the same rock solid set of irrefutable fundamental principles.

It does not rely on deception or changing the meaning of words to suit its purpose or befuddle the reader, a perfect example of which is given to us on a plate when Monbiot says that people who promote Libertarianism pitch it against liberty. This statement is absurd on its face.

Freedom can never be an instrument of oppression, by definition, if you are not working from the bespoke dictionary of George Monbiot.

You do not have the freedom to pollute other people’s land or bodies, or to steal money or property from them. When you participate in these immoral acts you immediately cease to be exercising freedom. But you know this.

The meaning of words is important. When people misuse them deliberately, they do so in order to confuse and deceive their readers. If you cannot construct an argument against something without changing the meaning of words, you have a strong indication that your position is incorrect.

In this piece, George Monbiot has demonstrated that he knows absolutely nothing about Libertarianism, has not read any of its foundational texts and is simply using the word ‘Libertarian’ as a axle to spin his attacks on the villains that are polluting the environment.

As the Ron Paul presidential bid gains momentum, we can expect many more empty attacks like this to emerge, as writers who have never read a single libertarian work are forced to tackle his philosophical positions. What this will do is expose either their complete ignorance about what Libertarianism is, or their inherently violent Statist philosophies, or their complete lack of the ability to think clearly.

In which of those three categories would you place George Monbiot?

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…above the grey sky.

“We’ve asked for it back. We’ll see how the Iranians respond.”

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‘Cos I’m a hiphopper. Yes I am.

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See the Press Assoc., BBQ, Terriblybad for examples of the most widely reported ‘angle’ on the study.

Babies born to first-time mothers who choose a home birth are almost three times more likely to die or suffer a medical complication, according to a report.

I have read the study, linked above. The overall risk for a ‘serious adverse outcome’ did not reach statistical significance in home birth vs other birthplace cohorts. Only when a specific subset of data were analysed was a significant result reached.

And just to clarify the inflammatory quote above, see table 8.4 in the Appendix to the study for the data which show that your child does not have ANY more likelihood of dying at home compared to a ‘medical’ setting. In fact, the highest proportion of neonatal deaths were found in freestanding midwifery units. For what it’s worth.

However, having read the study and having tried to understand the data, I would like to present an alternate interpretation.

CHOOSING TO GIVE BIRTH IN AN OBSTETRIC UNIT FUCKS YOU UP, AND FUCKS YOUR BABY UP, BEFORE YOU EVEN ARRIVE

It’s true, and this brilliant study proves it.

THEN THEY FUCK YOU UP SOME MORE

It’s true, and this brilliant study proves it.

Let me elucidate on the data which supports my hypothesis.

So, you are ‘low risk’ (defined by this study), gestation has gone very well (defined by this study), labour starts… at home you get on with things. Eventually a midwife usually arrives and checks you over.  At this stage only 5.4% of women at home had any kind of medical complication (meconium leaking, abnormal foetal heart rate and so on).

If, however, your labour starts and you have to leave home, get to hospital and do whatever they tell you to do before a midwife sees you… 19.5% of women showed 1 or more complications! 8x as many women in hospital had 2 or more complications than those women who stayed at home.  That’s a bad start.

So, baby is coming and those Obstetricians just can’t keep their hands away. If you’ve chosen hospital you have 4x more chance of little Chelsy being sucked out with a plunger (ventouse), 3.5x more use of metal salad servers (forceps), 5x more chance of being slit open (caesarean), almost 2x more chance of serious perineal trauma, 2x more blood transfusions, 5x less chance of a normal placenta delivery, 3x less chance to use natural pain relief such as water birth – but 4x more chemical pain relief (epidurals etc.), and, finally, 4x more chance of having your fanny slashed by a scalpel-happy medic.

Also, home birth rates better than midwife-led units in all these aspects.

Obstetric Unit births were classified as ‘spontaneous vertex’ (normal head-first) births in only 74% of cases.

At home your chance of a completely normal birth was 93%. Again higher than midwife-led units.

All this data is freely available in the study manuscript online and it’s online appendices.

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John Matonis has a new and excellent post on his ‘Monetary Future’ blog.

In it, he logically goes through some of the issues surrounding Bitcoin. It is well worth reading.

One section however, spurred this BLOGDIAL post. It’s the part about Vili Lehdonvirta’s ideas on ‘virtual goods’…

[...]

I am worried that Bitcoin is a step too far as it leaves no possibility for even democratic governments to enforce their laws. This is a topic I would love to debate with the community and hear opposing views. I think the end result could be a better understanding for me, but also a better understanding for the Bitcoin community on how to live in harmony with democratic authority.

Absolutely astonishing. A ‘step too far’? Towards or away from what exactly? We do not want to live in harmony with democratic authority. Democratic authority, to us, is inherently illegitimate, evil, immoral and completely unjustifiable. There are people who are attracted to Bitcoin precisely because it is beyond the control of ‘democratic authority’. As for it being a step too far, we must bear in mind that no one is forcing anyone to use Bitcoin. You decide on your own to use it, and if it succeeds or fails, you take the benefit or profit or losses respectively. Violent Statists are of course, vehemently opposed to free trade, voluntary exchange and liberty. Bitcoin is to the Statist as sunrise is to Dracula.

Matonis chimes in with…

For the most part, I respect Vili Lehdonvirta’s academic work on virtual goods ownership, but he harbors confused thoughts on the broader acceptance of bitcoin through dilution of its most beneficial properties, because he mistakenly extends the notion of virtual goods legal recognition to virtual currency legal recognition.

Fascinating. The Statists from the legal profession class are described by Murray Rothbard in ‘For a New Liberty’ as follows:

We see clearly why the State needs the intellectuals; but why do the intellectuals need the State? Put simply, the intellectual’s livelihood in the free market is generally none too secure; for the intellectual, like everyone else on the market, must depend on the values and choices of the masses of his fellow men, and it is characteristic of these masses that they are generally uninterested in intellectual concerns. The State, on the other hand, is willing to offer the intellectuals a warm, secure, and permanent berth in its apparatus, a secure income, and the panoply of prestige.

[...] since the early origins of the State, its rulers have always turned, as a necessary bolster to their rule, to an alliance with society’s class of intellectuals. The masses do not create their own abstract ideas, or indeed think through these ideas independently; they follow passively the ideas adopted and promulgated by the body of intellectuals, who become the effective “opinion moulders” in society. And since it is precisely a moulding of opinion on behalf of the rulers that the State almost desperately needs, this forms a firm basis for the age-old alliance of the intellectuals and the ruling classes of the State. The alliance is based on a quid pro quo: on the one hand, the intellectuals spread among the masses the idea that the State and its rulers are wise, good, sometimes divine, and at the very least inevitable and better than any conceivable alternatives. In return for this panoply of ideology, the State incorporates the intellectuals as part of the ruling elite, granting them power, status, prestige, and material security. Furthermore, intellectuals are needed to staff the bureaucracy and to “plan” the economy and society.

[...]

In all societies, public opinion is determined by the intellectual classes, the opinion moulders of society. For most people neither originate nor disseminate ideas and concepts; on the contrary, they tend to adopt those ideas promulgated by the professional intellectual classes, the professional dealers in ideas. Now, throughout history, as we shall see further below, despots and ruling elites of States have had far more need of the services of intellectuals than have peaceful citizens in a free society.

[...]

For States have always needed opinion-moulding intellectuals to con the public into believing that its rule is wise, good, and inevitable; into believing that the “emperor has clothes.” Until the modern world, such intellectuals were inevitably churchmen (or witch doctors), the guardians of religion. It was a cozy alliance, this age-old partnership between Church and State; the Church informed its deluded charges that the king ruled by divine command and therefore must be obeyed; in return, the king funneled numerous tax revenues into the coffers of the Church. Hence, the great importance for the libertarian classical liberals of their success at separating Church and State.

For a New Liberty

The whole idea of ‘Digital Goods’ is a fallacy, created by Statist professionals in order to gain a foothold in the emerging digital economy that threatens to disrupt their authority and completely replace the old world economy in many areas, specifically the delivery of films, books and music, and now through Bitcoin, the process of moving money around the globe.

The fallacious notion of ‘Digital Goods’ is pyramided on the idea that copyright (an artificial concept of the State) is legitimate and logical. As is the case with copyright, the idea of Digital Goods conflates the correct idea of property rights in real-world physical goods with a false right in intangible pure information, which can be infinitely copied, transmitted and transformed without loss.

An idea can have a human originator, but once that idea is conveyed to another man, it resides in the mind of that man. The only way that you can prevent that second man, the receiver, from using this idea is to initiate force against him. On this basis alone copyright as a legitimate idea falls, since it violates the non aggression axiom. I will leave it to you to explore the rest of this idea at your leisure. I also strongly recommend that you read ‘Against Intellectual Monopoly‘.

Bitcoin is an extraordinary and important innovation. It is the first system where a ‘Digital Good’ cannot be double spent. That means Bitcoins can be duplicated perfectly an infinite number of times, but they cannot be spent more than one transaction at a time between two people.

Bitcoins retain all the qualities of information (near zero cost transmission, infinite transformability, infinite lossless replicability), but the Bitcoin ecosystem changes them into something that has some of the qualities of physical property, whilst retaining all of the advantages of pure information. You can actually own a Bitcoin secure in the knowledge that even though everyone can read your Bitcoin, make copies of it, and see it in the Block Chain, they cannot steal it from you and spend it. You can copy Bitcoins ad infinitum, but inside the system is the only place where they have value or more accurately, utility. Bitcoin is the first instance of a digital representation that has some of the scarcity properties of a physical good.

Interestingly, this idea if transposed onto a music file, picture or film, could not work to prevent people using (double spending) those things, because there is no inherent value in owning a digital copy of a music file, film or book.

Imagine that instead of digital signatures, the Bitcoin block chain was used to control signed MP3 files. You could then have an ecosystem where unique copies of tracks (unique in that they were digitally signed, could not be forged and ownership was verifiable) could circulate for payment. The problem with this is that in this scenario music has two uses, one when it is stored in a file, and another when it is played in a music player, as well as being a string of numbers stored somewhere. There is also the ‘problem’ of the intent of music creators being that the same music is available to many people all at once.

Bitcoins do not have any use other than to confirm that they are owned by someone. This is why they can be used to transmit money over the internet. A digression, but interesting nonetheless, because this is the sort of thinking the large media companies should be doing or paying to have done for them, if they want to survive in any form over the next decade.

Apart from the revolutionary and singular case of Bitcoin in the Bitcoin ecosystem, all digital representations of ideas have zero intrinsic value, because they can be copied at a cost that approaches zero. In fact, the more copies there are, the lower the cost of obtaining a copy becomes because there are more storage locations to get them from and the cost of your time to search for them decreases. On some level, the law industry understands this, as they put pressure on Google to remove search results that point to files they claim contain ‘intellectual property’ belonging to their clients.

Digital technology has changed the way the world handles information forever. Trying to superimpose the outmoded, ridiculous and erroneous 19th century ways of thinking about property and business on people living today is a fruitless and anti-human endeavour. What’s more, it does not make everyone more honest and make business more efficient. Look at the dispute resolution mechanisms in eBay and Amazon, and you get a glimpse of how the free market works to protect everyone and benefit everyone. The State does not poke its snotty nose into the dispute resolution systems of these online services and the vast majority of transactions happen without any problems, and where there are problems, they are resolved within the mechanisms of the services to everyone’s satisfaction.

Just as the buggy whip makers, the lake ice industry and all superseded industries were eliminated by progress, the notion that music, books and any work that can be digitised should remain scarce, by force, is an astonishingly evil idea. The difference in people today as compared to those living in the age of the horse and cart it seems, is that this generation of men is not sufficiently agile, and a subset of them is unwilling to pivot and change business models to deal with the new reality. This is probably due to the very rapid pace of change, and the fact that there appears to be no future whatsoever for the people in the business of hoarding and supplying scarce information distributed in physical containers. They are squeezing this model for every drop of blood they can get before it becomes untenable to ask for money in exchange for physical discs or files.

Ill informed and self interested cronies and Statists are trying to keep man in horses and carts when the internal combustion engine car is in the garage of every home. It simply doesn’t make any sense on any level, is immoral, and the only reason why they can get away with it is they have an agent with the monopoly of violence to back them up: the State. In absentia of this force, no one would listen to the Statists, the MPAA/RIAA, the luddites, the lawyers, the buggy whip manufacturers and the Statists. Since they offer nothing of value, they would simply be ignored.

I predict that there will come a time when none of these people are taken seriously, and they are ignored and sidelined. The world simply will not be held down to the level of Stone Age Man to suit the needs of a vanishingly small number of venal, violent and ignorant men and their blinkered apologists. The dispute resolution systems that are an emergent property of sites like Amazon and eBay will spread out into the real world, making the State and its proponents redundant. It would be a fascinating project to try and separate these arbitration services and generalise them so that the public could use them instead of the courts of the State.

The fact of the matter is that lawyers have no right to tell anyone how to voluntarily exchange goods and under what terms those goods are to be exchanged. Their role is to arbitrate in disputes where both parties agree to be subject to the rules of the arbitrator, and nothing more. Because the vast majority of humans can exchange without disputes, they must create conflict in this area to maintain their social status and incomes, with the help of the State. This is why lawyers support the fallacious idea of copyright, and why they want to extend this sickness to Bitcoin, and all areas online.

The Statists refuse to accept reality, or cannot understand it, or understand it and actively fight to control it with violence. Lawyers especially have the most to gain from keeping the immoral, illogical and absurd copyright laws in force.

Or do they?

The fact of the matter is that once copyright laws are removed from all statute books, the amount of work for lawyers will not decrease, but will in fact increase, as creative people adapt to the new business models.

For example, no one has the right to steal a physical disk from anyone. If a musical work is created and stored in a fixed medium, and the right to be the first to sell it is sold to someone, a person who steals that disc and releases what is stored on it could be held liable for the damage caused to both contracting parties.

A disc of an unreleased highly anticipated pre-sold masterpiece would have an agreed value that is set out in a contract, and a value in pre-sales. Once it is leaked by theft and no one will pay for it, losses have been imposed upon the creative party, since exclusivity has been broken by the thief. In this scenario, damages are not calculated by how many copies are in the wild but by the fact that a physical disc has been stolen, its contents leaked and sales potential has been destroyed through cancellations. This is of course, completely separate from a work that is released on a disc, sold to a person, and that person making a copy for whatever reason. This is entirely legitimate, for reasons laid out clearly in Against Intellectual Monopoly.

This scenario is the same as someone breaking into a jewellery store and stealing a diamond necklace. Once that necklace has been stolen, it cannot be sold to someone else. The scenario of a pre-release disc being stolen and released is even worse, because the irreplaceable, unique first use opportunity has been destroyed forever. This is the true nature of the damage and theft done to both parties by this sort of act; the value of such a theft can be estimated and a valid moral claim made against a thief. Once again, this has nothing to do with the subsequent copies made by people who got a hold of the data by whatever means.

I use the example of the theft of a necklace deliberately, because it is used by the copyright monopoly to justify everyone being forbidden from making copies of what they own. Note how I am separating the act of copying what you have legitimately purchased from the destruction of potential by an unauthorised pre-release of a stolen disc.

There are many other circumstances where fault can be placed in this scenario. For example, if one party fails to maintain security and this is the cause of the leak, someone is at fault and has to pay. This can be laid out explicitly in a contract. These byzantine details are the job of lawyers to sort out, set terms for and organise. It is for lawyers to define these agreements, fix the agreed penalties, pursue the wrong doers in case of a breach of information. This would be a huge amount of complex work, worth an enormous amount of money. Lawyers are major beneficiaries of a world without copyright.

Of course, once a suite of music or book or other information is released, it can be copied ad infinitum, but then the next thrill is the thing that is valuable, and the public has an insatiable appetite for the new; this is just one possible model for the creative to explore, and of course, since they are the creative, its up to them to think of new ways of approaching the market in a reality where every idea can be copied and can spread world-wide in a matter of hours, if you hit exactly the right note.

The ignorant, imagination-less Statists want to prevent this astonishing world of the super abundance business model from fully emerging. They are doing everything they can to wreck the exponential growth of tools, contracts and technology that will unarguably benefit the entire planet, for the sake of a handful of ignorant, comfortable, computer illiterates.

Unfortunately for them, the harder they push against the internet, the stronger it becomes. Every service they have tried to cripple has either resulted in that service strengthening or spawning new services. Bulletin Board Systems, IRC DCC channels, Napster, Gnutella, Bittorrent are all examples in chronological order of how software outpaces the luddites, and of course, that list excludes the peripheral discoveries like MP3 that fuel the creation of new services.

This is a battle that they cannot win and which they should not win, because they have no case or moral foundation whatsoever.

Read this article in Hungarian.

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Unfortunately for the people who are doing this, Google can help us find out if they are an organized group or not.

Here is the root comment that looked suspiciously like many comments that I have read, from Raw Story:

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/11/21/ron-paul-gets-mic-checked-by-new-hampshire-protesters/#disqus_thread

and here is another example from a YouTube comment stream:

http://www.youtube.com/all_comments?v=lI1gvPmA_c8

You can find your own examples yourself. There are quite a few out there, with slightly different wording and in different contexts. A cursory search indicates that there might be a small group of people who are behind these comments. I don’t have time to research who they are with any precision. But we can do an analysis of what they are up to.

This activity is called ‘Glove Puppetry’ or more commonly Sock Puppetry.

Groups of people with an agenda to change the tone or direction of an online discussion, for money or the lulz, take on positions that are different to (opposition for money) the polar opposite of (opposition for lulz) the dominant group in a thread or stream of comments, to manipulate them, troll them and destroy any chance of a reasoned linear discussion.

Sock puppetry is also being done by the State, to try and influence public opinion. You can read about this practice in these links.

This is a very interesting subject, on many levels. Can Sock Puppetry work in the age of the internets? Google is only a click away from any instance of puppetry, so any lie can be instantly neutralised. Also, a Sock Puppet entering into a nest of people who are thinking in one way (correctly or not) cannot gain traction without being exposed as a troll and voted down where a down arrow is available. Sock Puppets do not believe what they are typing, they are working off of a script. Within one or two replies you can spot a Sock Puppet because their thinking and writing is not coherent. When the script comes to its end, all they have is ad hominem attacks, which means they lose.

We wrote about this as an example of Baudrillard’s ‘Mass’. You should read ‘In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities‘ for some insight into the difficulty of penetrating coherent groups of people who are thinking in one way, though in this case the fit is not exact.

In the meantime, now that you have these two examples, you know the format of the current organised poison trolling that is taking place wherever a Ron Paul discussion or stream of comments is in progress. I will leave it to you to find your own examples, and to discover who the source of these troll / Sock Puppet posts is.

Hopefully, if enough people find out about these Sock Puppets, their effect will be neutralised. Its good to refute the bad arguments of people who are misguided, but wasting time on Sock Puppets is not a good use of time.

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What is interesting here is that we may be seeing the seed of the idea that all the video cameras that everyone has by default could be used for something useful, active and defensive, instead of just a child’s toy.

From BLOGDIAL, “The answer comes before the question” January 13th, 2009

Imagine this scenario. Someone somewhere sets up a Web 2.0 site that features photos of bad police and other officials, or those mysterious agent provocateurs that have been plaguing the useless demonstrations around the world. Imagine that the software behind this site (which could be connected to iPhoto 09) identifies all the bad people and exposes them to the public, nullifying all acts of political infiltration over night. Anyone setting up any sort of anti-state gathering or demonstration or action could, with a gauntlet of workers armed with iphones, vet every demonstrator as they turned up to weed out all the infiltrators, collaborators and provocateurs.

I guarantee you that this will happen, and not only that, but that someone is going to put into a copy of iPhoto 09, a huge archive of photos from demonstrations and political meetings going back decades to pick out the bad guys.

This explosion and convergence of technologies is a double edged sword, and since there are more of us than there are of them, it will be the case that all this technology and the networks that join them together will result in something totally unexpected; the tools may turn around and bite the state in the ass in an unexpected way. The very nature of networks says that this will happen; the population by virtue of its vast networked numbers can overpower any government in a scenario where the network is the power.

We are not powerless like the slaves in the Soviet Union were. We have fantastic tools, all of them free, right in our hands. Those tools, by the act of using them, change the game entirely, and the more the state pushes against the mass, the more dense and impenetrable it becomes.

This is a war that they cannot ever win.

http://irdial.com/blogdial/?p=1517

[...]

Now look at this video, uploaded to YouTube by noshockdoc on Nov 11, 2011:

If these people had any sense, they would have already set up this web service as I described in 2009.

Using Augmented Reality ID:

They could check each ‘protestor’ against the online database of Agent Provocateurs and police officers to make sure that they had not been infiltrated.

Of course, anyone who is that smart is not interested in demonstrating in the first place, but we will leave that aside for now.

The point is, these young and very foolish people are behaving as if it is 1960 and not the end of 2011. As I have said before, again and again, the age of demonstrations is over. The shape of them, how they play out, move, surge and flow is well understood. There can be no surprises with them. Nothing comes of them, no matter how large they are, as we saw with the StopWar demonstrations before the destruction of Iraq.

The problem these people have is that if they were intelligent enough to know this, they would not be demonstrating, and would be well on the way to formulating a strategy that would actually give them what they want. Their problem, clearly, is a toxic mix of a lack of intelligence and experience.

They do not know exactly what they hope to achieve with these acts, they have no discrete goals or deliverables, they have no means of creating a new strategy because they lack the mental capacity to formulate one; in other words, they are a completely lost cause.

One thing that is coming out of this is interesting however.

Because everyone has a camera at these demonstrations, it might come to pass that the light bulb switches on over the head of some computer science student as she realises that it should be possible to create what I describe in the post above.

There are literally dozens of cameras in this clip; surely someone somewhere must be thinking that there is a use that can be put to the footage to help weed out the provocateurs. Who knows?

What we can say with a high level of certainty is that these students are going to achieve nothing by marching in the street. Everything they are planning, even if it is not known about in advance by surveillance is easily counter-able because marching and demonstrating is a ‘dead tactic’ that the State has a perfect understanding of.

All of this is a complete distraction of course; even this very post has distracted me from doing something else productive. Unless by chance it spurs the creation of the system I have been writing about.

Once again, demonstrations are ‘Yellow Ribbon Thinking’:

http://irdial.com/blogdial/?p=1152

they divert energy from useful acts and thinking, and prevent or delay permanent solutions from emerging. You should not participate in them; instead, you should be working only on things that have discreet goals and that has metrics that you can measure directly so that you can know if you are being successful or not.

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This new technology requires some new thinking when it comes to developing businesses that are built upon it. In the same way that the pioneer providers of email did not correctly understand the service they were selling for many years, new and correct thinking about Bitcoin is needed, and will emerge, so that it reaches its full potential and becomes ubiquitous.

Hotmail used familiar technologies (the browser, email) to create a better way of accessing and delivering email; the idea of using an email client like Outlook Express has been superseded by web interfaces and email ‘in the cloud’ that provides many advantages over a dedicated client with your mail in your own local storage.

Bitcoin, which will transform the way you transfer money, needs to be understood on its own terms, and not as an online form of money. Thinking about Bitcoin as money is as absurd as thinking about email as another form of sending letters by post; one not only replaces the other but it profoundly changes the way people send and consume messages. It is not a simple substitution or one dimensional improvement of an existing idea or service.

As I have explained previously, Bitcoin is not money. Bitcoin is a protocol. If you treat it in this way, with the correct assumptions, you can start the process of putting Bitcoin in a proper context, allowing you to make rational suggestions about the sort of services that might be profitable based on it.

If Bitcoin is a protocol and not money, then setting up currency exchanges that mimic real world money, stock and commodity exchanges to trade in it doesn’t make any sense. You would not set up an email exchange to buy and sell email, and the same thing applies to Bitcoin.

Staying with this train of thought, when you type in an email on your Gmail account, you are inputting your ‘letter’. You press send, it goes through your ISP, over the internets, into the ISP of your recipient and then it is outputted on your recipient’s machine. The same is true of Bitcoin; you input money on one end through a service and then send the Bitcoin to your recipient, without an intermediary to handle the transfer. Once Bitcoin does its job of moving your value across the globe to its recipient it needs to be ‘read out’, i.e. turned back into money, in the same way that your letter is displayed to its recipient in an email.

In the email scenario, once the transfer happens and the email you have received conveys its information to you, it has no use other than to be a record of the information that was sent (accounting), and you archive that information. Bitcoin does this accounting in the block chain for you, and a good service built on it will store extended transaction details for you locally, but what you need to have as the recipient of Bitcoin is money or goods not Bitcoin itself.

Bitcoin’s true nature is as an instant way to transmit money anywhere in the world. It is not an investment, or money itself, and holding on to it in the hopes that it will become valuable is like holding on to an email or a PDF in the hopes it will be come valuable in the future; it doesn’t make any sense.

Despite the fact that you cannot double spend them and each one is unique, Bitcoins have no inherent value, unlike a book or any physical object. They cannot appreciate in value. Mistaken thinking about Bitcoin has spread because it behaves like money, due to the fact it cannot be double spent. This fact however has masked Bitcoin’s dual nature of being digital, duplicable and not double spendable.

Bitcoin is digital, with all the qualities of information that make information non scarce. It sits in a new place that oscillates between the goods of the physical world and the infinitely abundant digital world of information, belonging exclusively to the digital world but having the characteristics of both. This is why it has been widely misunderstood and why a new approach is needed to design businesses around it.

All of this goes some way to explain why the price of buying Bitcoins at the exchanges doesn’t matter. If the cost of buying a Bitcoin goes to 1¢ This does not change the amount of money that comes out at the other end of a transfer. As long as you redeem your Bitcoins immediately after the transfer into either goods or currency, the same value comes out at the other end no matter what you paid for the Bitcoins when you started the process.

Think about it this way. Let us suppose that you want to send a long text file to another person. You can either send it as it is, or you can compress it with zip. The size of a document file when it is zipped can be up to 87% smaller than the original. When we transpose this idea to Bitcoin, the compression ratio is the price of Bitcoin at an exchange. If a Bitcoin is $100, and you want to buy something from someone in India for $100 you need to buy 1 Bitcoin to get that $100 to india. If the price of Bitcoin is 1¢ then you need 10,000 Bitcoins to send $100 dollars to India. These would be expressed as compression ratios of 1:1 and 10,000:1 respectively.

The same $100 value is sent to India, wether you use 10,000 or 1 Bitcoin. The price of Bitcoins is irrelevant to the value that is being transmitted, in the same way that zip files do not ‘care’ what is inside them; Bitcoin and zip are dumb protocols that do a job.

As long as the value of Bitcoins does not go to zero, it will have the same utility as if the value were very ‘high’.

Bearing all of this in mind, its clear that new services to facilitate the rapid, frictionless conversion into and out of Bitcoin are needed to allow it to function in a manner that is true to its nature.

The current business models of exchanges are not addressing Bitcoin’s nature correctly. They are using the Twentieth Century model of stock, commodity and currency exchanges and superimposing this onto Bitcoin. Interfacing with these exchanges is non-trivial, and for the ordinary user a daunting prospect. In some cases, you have to wait up to seven days to receive a transfer of your fiat currency after it has been cashed out of your account from Bitcoins. Whilst this is not a fault of the exchanges, it represents a very real impediment to Bitcoin acting in its nature and providing its complete value.

Imagine this; you receive an email from across the world, and are notified of the fact by being displayed the subject line in your browser. You then apply to your ISP to have this email delivered to you, and you have to wait seven days for it to arrive in your physical mail box. The very idea is completely absurd, and yet, this is exactly what is happening with Bitcoin, for no technical reason whatsoever.

It is clear that there needs to be a re-think of the services that are growing around Bitcoin, along with a re-think of what the true nature of Bitcoin is. Rethinking services is a normal part of entrepreneurialism and we should expect business models to fail and early entrants to fall by the wayside as the ceaseless iterations and pivoting progress.

Bearing all of this in mind, focussing on the price of Bitcoin at exchanges using a business model that is inappropriate for this technology simply is not rational; its like putting a methane breathing canary in a mine full of oxygen breathing humans as a detector. The bird dies even though nothing is wrong with the air; the miners rush to evacuate, leaving the exposed gold seams behind, thinking that they are all about to be wiped out, when all is actually fine.

Bitcoin, and the ideas behind it are here to stay. As the number of people downloading the client and using it increases, like Hotmail, it will eventually reach critical mass and then spread exponentially through the internet. When that happens, the correct business models will spontaneously emerge, as they will become obvious, in the same way that Hotmail, Gmail, Facebook, cellular phones and instant messaging seem like second nature.

In the future. I imagine that very few people will speculate on the value of Bitcoin, because even though that might be possible, and even profitable, there will be more money to be made in providing easy to use Bitcoin services that take full advantages of what Bitcoin is.

One thing is for sure speed will be of the essence in any future Bitcoin business model. The business that provide instant satisfaction on both ends of the transaction are the ones that are going to succeed. Even though the volatility of the price of Bitcoin is bound to stabilise, since it has no use in and of itself, getting back to money or goods instantly will be a sought after characteristic of any business built on Bitcoin.

The needs of Bitcoin businesses provide many challenges in terms of performance, security and new thinking. Out of these challenges will come new practices and software that we can only just imagine as they come over the horizon.

This article is available in Hungarian

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I didn’t like Apple computers initially. They appealed mainly to stupid people who did not like to think and learn how things work. MacOS used a file system that made it a pain to share things with Mac users, corralling them off into a fenced in crippled world that was cut off from everyone else.

The number one promise of commodity computers, that they can be used to connect people, was broken with the old MacOS. On top of that, it instilled a counter productive siege mentality in its legions of irrational adherents.

That is an old Mac ad, perfectly exemplifying their bad attitude.

Then, everything changed.

Thanks to Steve Jobs returning to the company he started, Apple did something that very few companies have the guts to do; throw out their bedrock product that sucks and replace it entirely by starting again from scratch with something that is better. I am talking about NEXT/UNIX.

For years people like me had dreamed of a UNIX with an Apple quality interface. It would mean that we had all the stability and power of UNIX with the ease of use of Apple. It seemed like an impossible dream, because it would have meant that the entire existing user base of MacOS would need to change over to some new imaginary UNIX OS. It would mean developers like Adobe re-writing all their mac specific apps from the bottom up.

This is exactly what happened.

This is a BLOGDIAL post from Wednesday, January 26, 2005 about the advert above:

This advert is the perfect example of why I used to hate the Apple philosophy.

A philosophy that said, “You are too dumb to learn and thats OK”.

Apple was a company that use to sell computers whose selling point was that you didn’t have to learn in order to use them. In fact, this advert and many others made a virtue out of not having to learn. This was coming from a company that was selling itself as the makers of the best computers for education. Appalling and anti human in equal measure. Humans love to learn, they love challenges, they aspire, they collect knowledge – this is what is special about them. The Apple Macintosh was a tool that kept the user dumb; anathema to anyone with human curiosity about how things work.

Now of course, the anti learning OS that MacOS was has been completely dumped for a real OS, UNIX, ‘arcane’ command line and all, and lo and behold, its the best operating system ever, for the dumbest of the dumb and the highest of high evolutionaries and all in between.

You can ‘just do your work’ like the Apple devotees use to bleat, AND you can run Ruby (almost) straight out of the box; its the best of both worlds, and a miracle that Apple had the guts and foresight to completely abandon their previous OS for a completely fresh start. This is what sold me on Apple, and having finally bought one, it has performed as expected over the year that I have been running it. Perfectly.

I just had an uptime of 38 days, the restart due only to software update. It never fails. You can get into an uninterrupted workflow with it….you know the rest.

What Steve Jobs showed everyone, again and again, is that you do not have to put up with second best with whatever it is you are making. You can have the best of all possible worlds, and you can sell it.

This, for me, is his greatest contribution, on top of all the software directed and marshalled by him. People now imagine and expect things to be ‘Apple like’; powerful simple to use, stable and beautiful all at the same time.

What apple did to mobile phone interfaces, simply by existing, is a perfect example. Looking at the Sony/Ericsson P900 and the iPhone gives you a good idea what I am talking about. All mobile phone manufacturers are trying to catch up with Apple’s iPhone with their derivative, clunky mock Apple interfaces. The ideas that Steve Jobs expressed through Apple are the very definition of ‘raising the bar’.

Many people complain about the proprietary nature of Apple. I myself don’t like the idea of their completely un-private iCloud service. None of this is Apple’s problem, and you could have guaranteed that if Steve Jobs had lived, Apple would have radically changed direction to make what was broken not only fixed, but great.

People like Steve Jobs do not come along very often, and they are almost irreplaceable. In the field of technology, people with arts sensitivity and deep technical insight are rare. You mostly get wooden, high functioning autism spectrum types that don’t have real love for what they do because they do not understand love the way artists do. These people have their uses and their place, but to create magic, to inspire and fire the imagination, to take bold steps you need a person like Steve Jobs, who has a balance of characteristics. Then you need to have him in charge.

I have no doubt that there will be other neuro-typical people with great and broad strengths. What is not so clear is wether there will be a confluence of circumstances that will put them in a position to end up running a company like Apple. I do not know what people Apple have who could replace Jobs as the chief inspirationalist. Even if they had one, could he be put into control in a way that Steve Jobs was?

Who knows?

What we do know is that Steve Jobs is up there with Edison, Ford, Wang, Marconi, Crock, Wright, Bell, Hamming and others in the pantheon of inventors, entrepreneurs and thinkers that changed everything fundamentally.

Take a look at this:

People like this are what we need, in every sphere. People who are not frightened of making a mistake, people who do not instinctively think, “Why?”, but who always reflexively think, “Why not?”.

Its the people who think, “Why not?” that make the world better, that abolish evil, stupidity, broken things and the lies and base cowardice of the status quo.

What this man did, how he did it, his relentlessly high expectations and standards will live long after his death.

Its a great privilege to have been alive to see it.

UPDATE…

Richard Stallman and Eric Raymond have both come out with statements condemning Steve Jobs because Apple has created a jail for its users. They are correct. Apple iPhone and its App ecosystem are closed, restricted and un-free. They stop you from doing exactly what you want on your own property, your mobile phone. I run an Apple iPhone, and its jailbroken. I also run Android on it with Bootlace I own what I buy, and no one can tell me what to do with my own property.

These two people, who are highly intelligent, suffer from a problem of their own reality distortion field, where what they think is right is what is true and the only truth, and everyone else is nothing more than a shadow on the wall of the cave.

This is why they think (by example) that everyone should be expected to use Emacs instead of Pages or Word to write letters, and that they are being defrauded and jailed by not using Emacs.

This is pure unadulterated autism on stilts. These people are incapable of understanding the big picture, or other people’s positions in the real world. Their attitude is what has hampered the adoption of free software. Their sour brand of blinkered, narrow, intolerant, unsympathetic, ridiculous, narrow minded, low horizon thinking kept the greatness of Linux away from millions, continues to allow the jail they despise so much to grow exponentially and doesn’t do anyone any favours at all.

They are not even able to sympathise with the death of a human being; how can you expect these same people to empathise with a computer user who just wants to type out her homework, print it and hand it in?

As I have said before, it takes well grounded people with functioning empathy to make software products great and accessible to the public. Debian would still be in autism jail if it were not for Mark Shuttleworth and Ubuntu; to this very day, Debian does not have a single screenshot on its site. Compare and contrast with Ubuntu. Which one do you think a person who wants out of computer jail is going to try?

At the end of the day, these people are illogical. On the one hand, they want everyone to be out of Apple’s jail. On the other they do everything they can to turn people off of their software. They refuse to polish it. They refuse to listen to anyone’s requirements. They even mistreat the people who collaborate on improving their software. Free Software is a success despite the sabotage acts of Richard Stallman.

Many years ago, the free software foundation ran a campaign called ‘defective by design‘ where they encouraged people to boycott Apple because it used DRM. You cannot play music on the best system available by boycotting it. You have two choices; write better software than Apple does, or write liberation tools that give people full control over their property.

Obviously the former is impossible for the FSF; it takes empathy to be able to write tools that ordinary people can use. Clearly the latter is the route to go, and lo and behold there are literally millions of people who have the best of both worlds on their i-devices through jailbreaking.

A very small number of incredibly clever developers have made it possible for millions of people to be able to run Emacs on their iPhones. And its legal.

It is a source of consistent amazement to me that people who understand how software works do not understand that software problems can be solved with software. The Apple jail problem is one that can be solved by writing applications that free the user. Rather than do this, they exhort people to boycott the best products ever developed so that they can use software that the developers will not even provide a preview image of… its so ridiculous its hard to imagine that its even true.

Consider this. Organisations like the Free Software Foundation need donations to survive. Irrational or not, noone will donate to an organization run by people who celebrate the death of men who have brought so much good to so many people.

Apple, even though its products are not perfect, has, as I say above, done much to raise our expectations and standards. They have unleashed the imaginations of millions of people, allowed them to communicage ←- I actually typed that – with each other despite using devices that run proprietary software.

The net effect of Apple and Steve Jobs has been positive. It means that the advocates of free software have to do better, write better software and start acting like neuro-typical people or they will simply be left behind forever in a niche as the cloud combined with trusted platform hardware completely eliminates any possibility of running what you want on your own hardware.

Without millions in backing to hire developers, and most importantly, communicators, the FSF is doomed. No one will mourn them, despite the amazing work they have done, the crucial software they have written and the philosophical framework and licenses they have developed.

These people simply must come to terms with their own limitations and start to behave in a way that will foster adoption of their systems. Either that, or leave it to the Mark Shuttleworth’s of this world who have the skill to do what they cannot do. Either way, as it stands now their beneficial movement needs to change if it is to reach the millions of ordinary users that need to be ‘freed’.

Consider also this. Nintendo produced computers that are the ultimate form of jail. They allow you to only run their cartridges on their hardware. You have no access whatsoever to the operating system, and indeed, no way to access anything with an alphanumeric keyboard. All you are given is a small controller. Who in their right mind would say that Nintendo has brought only bad into the world because they release computers that only ran programmes written by their partners.

Its completely insane.

Computing is not static. Its future remains unwritten. That future will be mediated by software. If the FSF and its adherents do not write the software that shapes the future, their arguments are meaningless. Software is the only thing that matters. If you do not write it, and people cannot run your software, you have no future, no matter how good your ideas are or how moral they are or noble your intentions.

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It will not work.

The problem they have is one of reputation, and six degrees of separation.

Because everyone is connected to everyone else by only six steps, it is now impossible to inject a lie into the hive mind of The Mass and have that lie survive scrutiny.

We have spoken about The Mass before on BLOGDIAL; it is the accurate prediction of the Twitter mediated hive mind that is impervious to the State and its lies.

Even if this vile attack on the truth through manipulation and lies was successful in any way, countermeasures can be built in software that would completely eradicate the influence of these glove puppet agents provocateurs.

Using the model of the PGP web of trust and the fact of six degrees of separation, it is possible to build a self organising, self healing global network of trusted introducers who can re-tweet only what is known to have not come from a glove puppet.

These trusted introducers and their messages would carry more weight than any glove puppet, and in fact, Twitter almost does this spontaneously through its simple method of people following each other and getting to know the sort of tweets that come out of the people they follow.

Anyone who uses these social networking tools understands that un-following is instant, adaptive network healing; if someone you follow says something that is a lie you either refute them by replying in public or un-following them and never again re tweeting their messages.

These simple actions are like the behaviour of antibodies fighting off infection, in this case, the infection of lies told by lying glove puppets.

These military people simply do not understand the world the are now living in. They cannot use their ridiculous twentieth century PSYOP strategies by ‘upgrading‘ them and superimposing them on Twitter; it simply will not transpose to these media.

What they must now realise is that lying as a strategy is finished. This would be the breakthrough that would put them on a strong footing for total domination of the social networking space. Sadly (or happily) they simply have not got a clue, nor the ethical foundation to make the correct strategic decision.

Lets do this!

The US military is developing software that will let it secretly manipulate social media sites by using fake online personas to influence internet conversations and spread pro-American propaganda.

They will fail.

A Californian corporation has been awarded a contract with United States Central Command (Centcom), which oversees US armed operations in the Middle East and Central Asia, to develop what is described as an “online persona management service” that will allow one US serviceman or woman to control up to 10 separate identities based all over the world.

Wait a minute, is it the US Military, or is it some snake-oil salesman in California who made a successful pitch?

The project has been likened by web experts to China’s attempts to control and restrict free speech on the internet.

This is utter nonsense, Grauniad style. Censorship has nothing to do with organised glove puppetry; everyone can continue saying whatever it is they like, unimpeded. Can these morons even define the words they are using? Shocking stupidity, and par for the course at the Grauniad!

Critics are likely to complain that it will allow the US military to create a false consensus in online conversations, crowd out unwelcome opinions and smother commentaries or reports that do not correspond with its own objectives.

Critics are nothing more than cry babies whining instead of writing software. As I say above, a web of trust can be built either spontaneously or with software designed to tamp down glove puppetry and MILCOMTROLLS. You can always spot trolls very easily, especially when they use templates or multiple identities to spam comments. The Telegraph comments sections are full of garbage; all you have to do to tune it out however, is to set Disqus to ‘best rated’.

The single act of people rating comments up (and not down, there is no downvote button) crowd-sources the bullshit out of sight. If an organised team of MILCOMTROLLS tries to hijack the comments, it is always the case that the best refuting comment outshines the glove puppetry, and the takeover backfires completely.

The people who put this contract out to tender have absolutely no idea how any of this works, and it is going to backfire on them spectacularly. Just ask Johan Hari about how Google can expose misdeeds in English. Any MILCOMTROLLS that try and poison threads or spin the hash tags will be spotted, outed and crowded out, reinforcing the exact opposite messages that they are trying to push.

The discovery that the US military is developing false online personalities – known to users of social media as “sock puppets” – could also encourage other governments, private companies and non-government organisations to do the same.

So what? Its just like other governments wanting nuclear weapons because the USA has them, or countries like India wanting ID Cards because most European countries have them.

The Centcom contract stipulates that each fake online persona must have a convincing background, history and supporting details, and that up to 50 US-based controllers should be able to operate false identities from their workstations “without fear of being discovered by sophisticated adversaries”.

This is unfeasible, and if it is feasible, the web of trust can isolate and expunge these glove puppets. Also, consider that when individuals write blog comments or send tweets, they think about what they are writing, instead of working from a script. The only way this MILCOMTROLL plan could possibly work is if they hired individuals to write from the MILCOM point of view, genuinely on a case by case basis, with the target articles distributed to them for attack.

You cannot create a fool proof system where one person can control ten identities and not be crowded out or discovered. Because each of these identities, credible or not, will all be propagating the same point of view, this fact alone would be enough to characterise, isolate, and quarantine them.

Centcom spokesman Commander Bill Speaks said: “The technology supports classified blogging activities on foreign-language websites to enable Centcom to counter violent extremist and enemy propaganda outside the US.”

Ron Paul 2021!

He said none of the interventions would be in English, as it would be unlawful to “address US audiences” with such technology, and any English-language use of social media by Centcom was always clearly attributed. The languages in which the interventions are conducted include Arabic, Farsi, Urdu and Pashto.

Its unlawful to glove puppet in English for American audiences, but its A-OK to ASSASSINATE Americans.

You cant make this stuff up.

Centcom said it was not targeting any US-based web sites, in English or any other language, and specifically said it was not targeting Facebook or Twitter.

Lies lies and more lies.

Once developed, the software could allow US service personnel, working around the clock in one location, to respond to emerging online conversations with any number of co-ordinated messages, blogposts, chatroom posts and other interventions. Details of the contract suggest this location would be MacDill air force base near Tampa, Florida, home of US Special Operations Command.

Once again, coordinated messages will be identified and neutralised. Think about this as a possible way of destroying the effectiveness of this dastardly plan.

Akismet is a distributed tool for eliminating spam. It is 99.99% effective. A system like that could be used to completely eliminate the occurrence of glove puppets and mass up/downvoters.

Since these people will be working in a coordinated way, their acts will be synchronised. It will be possible to identify them as a group and then systematically exclude them from showing up in comments or as up-votes. Digg has some experience in this, where massive groups of paid Diggers were organised to push stories onto the front page. Since these people all work together, it only takes a few instances of them working to simultaneously to generate a unique fingerprint of their behaviour, which can then be tested against when future MILCOMTROLL style attacks are initiated.

Of course, all this happens silently in the software, so like SEOs trying to game Google, they will meet with a very serious problem the instant they roll this programme out. Anyone working with Gmail knows that it is spam free. This proves that distributed, collaborative filtering and secret sauce software can work to keep out the bad guys.

Centcom’s contract requires for each controller the provision of one “virtual private server” located in the United States and others appearing to be outside the US to give the impression the fake personas are real people located in different parts of the world.

These people are not going to be posting in English. This is a big hurdle for the glove puppets who are going to be operating their MILCOMTROLL identities. Online credibility is not just a matter of getting an accurate word for word translation of an idea; there are cultural references, nuances and cues that the American military are notoriously and hopelessly bad at. Can you imagine some shorn headed operative in jungle camo, sitting in an air conditioned room in Tampa Florida, trying to pass herself off as a muslim man in Riyadh? Or ten different people in Riyadh?!

The whole idea is simply ridiculous, and in fact the targets of this rubbish will not need any special software to detect these MILCOMTROLLS, they will give themselves away when they post during prayers or some other stupid (and fatal) basic cultural error.

It also calls for “traffic mixing”, blending the persona controllers’ internet usage with the usage of people outside Centcom in a manner that must offer “excellent cover and powerful deniability”.

This is snake oil straight from the brochure. NO $ALE!

The multiple persona contract is thought to have been awarded as part of a programme called Operation Earnest Voice (OEV), which was first developed in Iraq as a psychological warfare weapon against the online presence of al-Qaida supporters and others ranged against coalition forces.

Ridiculous. There were no al-Qaida in Iraq before the Americans got there. This is pure and utter bullshit, and those with memories longer than goldfish know this. The war of blowing people to bits, and pictures of it, are worth many thousands of MILCOMTROLLS. You cannot win hearts and minds with a gun, or a drone. Period. This is a waste of time and a waste of money, and I strongly suspect that anyone who has been on a tour in Iraq will confirm this. The military are giving more money to Ron Paul; more than all the other candidates combined. This is not an accident; these people know what is really going on, and no amount of snake oil, lies, glove puppets or trolls can stop the truth from coming out.

Since then, OEV is reported to have expanded into a $200m programme and is thought to have been used against jihadists across Pakistan, Afghanistan and the Middle East.

And its not working, on a purely objective PR level, removing all aspects of right or wrong, who started what or anything other than the measure of mindshare. All you have to do is watch the propaganda that these people produce on LiveLeak. No troll, no commenter no one can counter the stark shock value of what these people are disseminating. They are winning the PR war because their PR is quantitatively better. Once again, this has nothing to do with what you personally think about them and their motives, its a pure matter of mathematical fact.

OEV is seen by senior US commanders as a vital counter-terrorism and counter-radicalisation programme. In evidence to the US Senate’s armed services committee last year, General David Petraeus, then commander of Centcom, described the operation as an effort to “counter extremist ideology and propaganda and to ensure that credible voices in the region are heard”. He said the US military’s objective was to be “first with the truth”.

The best counter-terrorism and counter-radicalisation programme would be to elect Ron Paul. It is a scientific fact that all terrorism against the USA would cease thirty days after Ron Paul was elected.

Do you think that that is a big claim to make? Very well, dont believe, me take it from someone, the only person in fact, who has done a 100% accurate study of the true nature of terrorism: Professor Robert Pape, in his lecture “Dying to Win”

In this lecture, he will prove to you with unassailable facts that if Ron Paul wins, terrorism goes away.

This month Petraeus’s successor, General James Mattis, told the same committee that OEV “supports all activities associated with degrading the enemy narrative, including web engagement and web-based product distribution capabilities”.

This is utter nonsense on stilts. The ‘enemies narrative’ as outlined by Dr. Pape is that America is occupying other people’s countries. That is the ONLY narrative, and no amount of glove puppetry can alter this fact. Only a complete removal of American forces from foreign lands can change the narrative and end the nightmare.

[...]

Finally, we get to the ‘me too’ part of the article:

It is unclear whether a persona management programme would contravene UK law. Legal experts say it could fall foul of the Forgery and Counterfeiting Act 1981, which states that “a person is guilty of forgery if he makes a false instrument, with the intention that he or another shall use it to induce somebody to accept it as genuine, and by reason of so accepting it to do or not to do some act to his own or any other person’s prejudice”. However, this would apply only if a website or social network could be shown to have suffered “prejudice” as a result.

Is an online identity, a nom de plume a ‘false instrument’? Any website that takes comments from anyone using any name has entered into a contract where such an act is acceptable, and so de-facto, the Forgery and Counterfeiting Act 1981 could not apply. The fact is that UK law is not anywhere near being relevant to glove puppetry and where they apply existing law, they nearly always get it horribly wrong, like the recent case of the autistic Troll imprisoned for… trolling.

Trolling is a simple matter of freedom of speech (property rights). The people who own the servers are publishing on their own property. They enter into contracts with people who leave comments. It is as simple as that. There is no space in that contract and interaction for the State to interject itself.

• This article was amended on 18 March 2011 to remove references to Facebook and Twitter, introduced during the editing process, and to add a comment from Centcom, received after publication, that it is not targeting those sites.

[...]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-operation-social-networks

Yeah, bullshit.

This is so full of fail there is fail spilled all over the floor.

The people who are least susceptible to MILCOMTROLL propaganda are the targets of this insane scheme. They are not going to buy any of this, and any attempt to spin the Twittersphere or blogosphere in English, in the USUK, as they are no doubt trying to do right now, is doomed to failure.

The mass rejects their malignant attempts at influence at every step, and as the economy continues to degrade, all calls to ignore the Federal Reserve, wage more wars, re-elect mobsters and murderers is going to ring so hollow that the sounds will resemble the biggest bell ever cast.

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